Cop Watchers Beware

Officers Accused of Assaulting Pair Who Tried to Document Abuse

Even as the cop approached him, Dennis Flores kept shooting. He took photo after photo with his digital camera, documenting the plainclothes transit officer's face.

Moments earlier, Flores says, he and friend Raybblin Vargas, both counselors at W.E.B. Du Bois high school in Brooklyn, had noticed the cop and his partner shoving a handcuffed black teenager face-first into a metal gate alongside the turnstiles in the Kingston-Throop C train station in Crown Heights. Flores fished the Kodak DC3200 from his backpack and from about 10 feet away started snapping.

But soon he and Vargas were snarled in their own tangle with police. Before it was over, they claim, they were unjustly maced, assaulted, and imprisoned. In fact, before they could request it, NYPD Internal Affairs initiated a probe that night. A police spokesperson had little comment last week, saying only, "It's an active investigation. We take the allegations very seriously."

photo: Pak Fung Wong

Raybblin Vargas and Dennis Flores say subway cops attacked them when they tried to help a teen.

As a result of the events that began at about 5:30 p.m. on October 10, Flores is facing criminal charges. But he claims he was merely recording a scene of apparent police abuse and was punished for it. Now he and Vargas are suing the city for violating their constitutional rights, among other claims. Meanwhile they wonder how the camera, with its cache of police images, is faring in NYPD custody. They are also waiting for the city to release the recording of a 911 call Flores placed from a subway pay phone as their troubles began. They say the receiver dangled off the hook throughout the incident and may have picked up key information.

Flores, 27, and Vargas, 30, were escorting two of their students into the Manhattan-bound side of the station when they noticed cops holding the teen, a 19-year-old high school senior named Bryce Sanders.

Asked for his account of the evening in a separate interview with the Voice last week, Sanderswho neither attends the counselors' school nor knew them before that night, and is not presently involved in any related legal actionsaid that police repeatedly overreacted. He says the cops accused him of using a MetroCard that had been tampered with. (Charges against him were dropped within 24 hours.) A young African American male from Crown Heights, Sanders says he is used to being hassled by police. But that night, he says, they were rough, cuffing his hands behind him and then "throwing" him against the token booth and the metal gate.

When he realized Flores was taking pictures, Sanders was glad. "The guy said, 'I see what's going on. I got your back,' " he says. "The cop said, 'Stop taking them f-ing pictures, get out of here.' " But Flores's camera kept flashing. "Then the cops double-cuffed me to the gate," Sanders says, and headed toward Flores.

But Flores says he didn't relent. He called out to the rush-hour crowd, "I have two cops who are beating this kid. I'm taking pictures as evidence."

The criminal complaint against Flores, signed by an officer, Christopher Ballaera, bears out part of the counselors' story. It reads, "[The] defendant, while taking pictures of police officer, did yell at passengers coming onto the subway that police officers are beating up a young kid and stating in sum and substance: fuck the police, the police are assholes, the police can't be doing this shit, don't let them get away with this, enough is enough." The statement continues, " . . . when [I] instructed the defendant to step back and walk away that defendant refused to do so."

An NYPD spokesperson confirmed that Ballaera is one of the officers under investigation but would not confirm the other name the Voice had obtained. Reached by telephone last week at the 33rd Transit District, Ballaera said, "I'm not allowed to comment on anything right now, especially for a newspaper." When the Voice mentioned the serious allegations being made against him, he said only that he wasn't aware of them.

Without much input from police, an account of the most troubling moments of the evening could be gleaned only from the three civilians. Flores claims that, as one of the officers approached him, the other said, "Hide your badge," which was hanging from the cop's neck. Says Flores, "That's when I picked up the phone," all the while snapping photos with one hand. "I knew the shit was on."

Vargas says she stepped between her friend and the cop. "I thought because I was a woman he would respect and back off a little bit." Instead, she says, with Flores on the phone with 911, the two officers planted themselves some six feet away and started spraying mace.

Says Sanders, who watched the whole scene while chained to the nearby gate, "I couldn't even believe that. They emptied out their cans of mace, on their face area and all over. They was helpless." He recalls hearing Flores on the phone: "He was saying, 'Help, help, the police is macing me.' " Flores and Vargas say they huddled together over the phone receiver as mace seared their skin and nearly blinded Vargas, whose contact lenses became saturated with the irritant. "The 911 operator was telling me, 'Don't hang up. Stay on the phone. Say everything that is happening,' " says Flores. He says he did, and he also thinks he managed to snap a few shots of the cops macing him.

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I have seen cops make people leave the area, threats of planting drugs and other evidence if they fail to leave. I met one kid, he was black, and he was a nice kid, who had some bad luck. He was no criminal by any means, in fact a a student in higher education classes at SUNY. Because he had no money, he was left with little choice. I myself have been victom of lies and police involvment, and seen 1st hand corupt police fail to investigate certain kids of influential people. They have a code they use for special offenders. MY son too was a victom of this, and there was nothing I could do but sit and watch it happen. With a 85 yr old judge who admits to forgetting stuff, they get away with it.